Monday Smackdown: Mike Sax Regrets the Inability of Chris Cillizza and His Fellow Journamalists at the Washington Post to Use Google...
Mike Sax: Colin Powell Protests too Much:
It's amazing what he doesn't remember now that he did remember two months ago. He was very happy to kick Hillary in the teeth over the weekend. Of course, [Chris Cillizza was very happy to write about it][]. It's about the only thing Cillizza ever writes about himself anymore at The Fix:
Colin L. Powell wasn't too happy that Hillary Clinton laid her decision to use a private email address at his feet during her interview with the FBI. And he made that annoyance plain over the weekend in the Hamptons:
The truth is she was using it (her personal email) for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did [during my term as secretary of state]. Her people have been trying to pin it on me.”
"Pin it on me." Oomph.
For starters she wasn't trying to 'pin it on him' this was in an interview with the FBI that was supposed to be private. Powell's beef is with Comey for choosing to wade into politics and handing over private info for House GOP consumption.... Powell did use private email for most of his SOS communications-as a State Department investigation found a few months ago. True he didn't use a server, though, his use of an AOL account was hardly failsafe. In fact, Powell was hacked....
Joe Conason: http://www.newsweek.com/did-colin-powell-advise-hillary-use-private-email-492376:
Yet in another sense, it is hardly surprising that Powell would prefer not to be drawn into the center of the continuing controversy over Clinton’s emails, a position he has carefully avoided so far. After all, not only did Powell use a private account to communicate with his State Department subordinates and others, like Clinton—but unlike her, he failed to provide any of those email records to the National Archives, which requested all of the former secretaries of state to turn over electronic records related to their government service....
As for Powell's denials-not really a denial, just a 'I don't recall-he recalled more in the past. You get a sense of the Hillary rules here:
Did Colin Powell suggest that Hillary Clinton should use her private email account as secretary of state—as he had admittedly done in that same job several years earlier? Last week, The New York Times confirmed that Powell did offer her precisely that advice, based on an account in my forthcoming book on Bill Clinton’s post-presidency. Yet Powell has responded by insisting that he has “no recollection” of such an incident.... Following up on my book... Amy Chozick discovered that Clinton had mentioned her conversation with Powell—as well as an email exchange with him on the same matter—when the FBI interviewed the Democratic presidential nominee during its probe of her private email use at the State Department. Powell’s office then released a statement saying he “has no recollection of the dinner conversation,” which he has since repeated to other news outlets. While hardly a denial, his response seems designed to cast doubt on the story.....
But last June, while reporting on Powell’s advice to Clinton for my book, I contacted his office for comment—and got a very different answer.... Margaret “Peggy” Cifrino, informed me then via email that their calendar showed that the Albright dinner had occurred in June 2009. While he didn’t recall some details of the dinner because it had occurred seven years ago, according to Cifrino, he remembered what he did and didn’t say to Clinton on the topic in question that evening:
He does recall sharing with Secretary Clinton his use of his email account and how useful it was and transformative for the Department. He knew nothing then or until recently about her private home server and a personal domain, nor, therefore, could he have advised her on that or suggested it. By June I would assume her email system was already set up...
